An Introduction to the Emergent and Ancient Art of Visual Communication

July 2010

07/26/2010

"Words and
language, whether written or spoken, do not seem to play any part in my thought
processes. The psychological entities that serve as building blocks for my
thought are certain signs or images, more or less clear, that I can reproduce
at will." Albert
Einstein

The Intersection of Nature, Geometry, and Communication

Shape of Thoughtmural, Eileen Clegg &
DeVarco 2009/2010

Across
cultures and throughout time, certain shapes have carried the power to inspire,
intimidate, delight and inform. A spiral, a pentagram, a labyrinth may invoke
momentary longing, fear, or curiosity, although we may not know why. Over the millennia, many mathematicians,
artists and scientists studied the secrets of timeless symbols—shapes that seem
to resonate with Nature and the human mind. But only in modern times, with the
explosion of new tools and technologies, has science enabled us to experience
the profound truth:

Certain
shapes and symbols draw our attention because they mirror the building blocks
of our bodies, the arrangement of distant galaxies, and the complex proportions
of Nature’s mechanisms, including the very nature of time itself. Appearing all around us—from our
grandmother’s quilts to Islamic tilings to maps of scientific data—these
resonant shapes represent a universal language. The ancient patterns that humans have drawn in the sand,
carved into stone, painted on the skin, woven into textiles and written on
countless media from papyrus to paperless cyberspace, tell us a story about who we are and how we make sense of the universe around us.

Powerful
images are not simply representations of physical objects or specific ideas;
they are containers of deep truths and ancient wisdom that are felt on an
emotional level as well as understood intellectually. Some symbols and archetypes contain shared meaning around
the world and across the generations. Today, as our world becomes more
connected and flooded with information, pictures have become critical to
sense-making. One theory is that the new global language will be one of images,
not words.

As
pictures, sketches, and animations become increasingly present on the Web, in
schools and organizations, some people today are scrambling to figure out new
taxonomies where symbols represent specific things. Some are even trying to
develop standards for communicating with images–complete with grammar and rules
for a new visual language. Yet in
the rush to translate words into images, we can lose the subtle potency of
visual communication by becoming too “literal.”

Rather
than narrowing the definition of symbols, we can open our minds to wisdom that
defies words. In the ancient
language of the visual, shapes themselves contain knowledge: about time, the universe, human
cognition and deep communication.
Instead of just using them, we can learn from them.

The Shape of Thought Approach

Now
that humanity has reached a crisis phase—drowning in information, at odds with
the Earth, and challenged to collaborate across cultures to solve
global-problems—we’ve reached the limits of traditional language as a species
trying to gain the wisdom we need to shift our paradigm. The language of shape (also called “visual
language”) is an alternative. It
connects history with a new future.

The
“Shape of Thought” an approach to visual language that focuses on the patterns
and meanings that link ancient artifacts, emergent technologies, Nature’s
geometry, and human cognition. It
is an alternative method of communication that most of us experience every day
without full awareness. It is a
re-discovery of a language that our ancestors used more consciously than we do
today. The decorations on ancient pottery were not random; often, they conveyed
our ancestors’ understanding of the world around them. Visual language is a
compressed way of understanding 6000 years of history, as well as the patterns
in Nature we’re discovering through today’s sophisticated instrumentation.

Using
the Shape of Thought approach, we honor images, particularly those that appear
repeatedly through history, as vehicles for communicating more than words can
tell us. We explore their historical meaning that may convey wisdom about
Nature and humanity that we have forgotten, or do not yet know. We use a new lens for data: looking for
patterns and shapes that are emerging as we visualize today’s massive
databases. We think of shape as more than an illustration of ideas, but as an
integral part of the story. We begin to see how history and the leading edge
meet in universal images that transform as humanity transforms.

Visuals are the Language of Intuition

“Ocular
imagination” means the “eye of the imagination,” the term was used by 17thcentury physician Robert Fludd who thought that an inner eye projected images
on to a mental screen.

Even
without understanding the anthropological and scientific reasons for why shapes
work, most of us “feel” their meaning.
That is why we often can communicate across languages and disciplines
with sketches and gestures. It may be as simple as someone pointing the
direction to get somewhere, or as subtle as someone sketching a spiral to
explain the unfolding of a new idea. Images often are more than compressed
communication; they convey a sense of emotion and meaning. Some of these are what the great
psychologist Carl J. Jung described “archetypes”—symbols that seem to be
inherited rather than acquired by humans.

Most
of us are vaguely aware that meaningful shapes have their origin in Nature, on
the micro and macro scale. Spiral things; fingerprints and galaxies; spherical
things: molecules and planets; helical things: climbing plants and proteins. A
spiral, a pyramid, a sphere, an “X”, a triskelion,[i]a five-pointed star, a square convey
concepts in subtle ways. People sensethe meaning of certain shapes. Often the meaning is shared across cultures, generations,
and professions.

Shapes
resonate on a subliminal level. They convey emotions, capture the “gestalt” of
a concept, and provide a sense of context. They do their job, even if their original meanings have been
lost in time. The people who first
drew spirals, trees, and stars lived in the same world we do—but perhaps saw it
differently because they were more consciously attuned to the cycles of Nature.
Some of the images that are now common symbols emerged as a result of the
original scientists mapping the world around them. Because we also experience
Nature— even unconsciously—these images resonate with us.

Often our bodies
intuitively know more than our brains understand about the meaning of
images. The language of shape is “spoken”
with spatial and kinetic intelligence, and is “read” visually. As an experiment, ask different people
to explain specific concepts with their hands and bodies – “flow,” “excitement,”
“the whole idea,” “defeated.” You will
likely find similarities: an
undulating motion for flow, arms open with energetic movement for excitement,
hands drawing a wide circle or big square in the air for the whole idea,
shoulders slumped and body closed for defeated.

Even
if our use of these visual cues is intuitive and our response to them
unconscious, we are communicating with the language of shape every day. At a time when information and
communication is flowing and changing rapidly, those who understand it
consciously will have an advantage.

An Intentional Visual Culture

Most
of our computers have turned into electronic scrapbooks full of photo, videos,
sketches and mind-maps. Everyone with a mobile device today has the capability
to create and consume a vast array of images on the go. The emergent visual culture is
one of online videos, animations, games, immersive virtual worlds, “augmented”
reality environments, global information systems. It’s not unusual on a given
day to swap photos and videos, have your avatar walking around in cyberspace,
and navigate the real world with a mirror of your movement on you handheld GPS
system. Often the visualizations are
for entertainment or used as illustrations for ideas – such as decorative
images inside 3D worlds, sketches alongside text in a report, animations that
tell a story. But out of the visual riot in today’s media, a more intentional
use of visual language is emerging.

Students
are learning to show their ideas in clusters, executives are literally writing
on the walls in corporate board rooms, biologists and physicists visit 3D
online worlds or immersive domes like University of California’s Allosphere to
see and share models of the universe, young readers are creating a new market
for graphic novels. From data
analysts to website designers to global team leaders, many people are looking
for ways to use images more effectively.

Many
information designers and scientists are studying artifacts dating back
thousands of years, back to a time when images were not used randomly but were
understood as the language of Nature. In the visual culture of our
ancestors—when people lived closer to the Earth—imagery carried deep meaning.
The circles and spirals they carved into stone were not just decoration; they
were a form of communication about their best understanding of how the world
worked.

Today,
as the world of visual communication is rapidly evolving, we have a unique
opportunity to consciously witness a shift in our cultural norms and collective
perspective. For example, not too long ago, we saw information with a linear
and static organization, in books or on grids. Now information is hyperlinked, three dimensional, and
depicted in a variety of shapes.
With geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning satellites
(GPS), we can now see information “in place”—tied to specific locations,
enabling us to see new relationships and the movements of communities through
time and space.

How
will these perceptual shifts change humanity? If we are returning to a time when information is depicted
in relationship to our planet, will we become more attuned to Nature? As modern scientists are weaving data
into visualizations that help us picture the nature of time and space, are we
hearkening back to ancient astronomers whose observations were woven into
fabric? What can we learn from the perspective of our ancestors who saw their
daily life in relation to the cycles of Nature?

The
Shape of Thought approach helps us to answer that question. We begin with several premises:

No
matter where we travel, usually we can make simple gestures to enable at least
some communication. People of
different ages, ethnic groups, and geographies often share a similar, if
general, sense of how concepts are shaped. This is why so many global organizations are using “visual
language” (artful depiction of
information using a strategic combination of images + few words). The most impactful images are those
that are very simple, similar to gestures we make with our hands: Like talking
with your hands and leaving a mark. As our world gets smaller and we are
challenged to collaborate across cultures to solve urgent global problems,
visual language helps create context for conversations, learning and
collaboration. We might not convey details in this kind of communication, but
we can share the gestalt or “big picture” of meaning. To the ancient Chinese
saying “a picture is worth a thousand words,” we would add “across cultures and
throughout time.”

The Language of Shape Resonates with the Mind

Cognitively,
certain images connect with the unconscious mind in a way that communicates
context as well as content.
Unbeknownst to most of us, certain powerful shapes are containers of
ancient knowledge and accurate reflectors of the how Nature works. As such, visual language can create a
cognitive frame that enables us to “wrap our heads” around complex topics.

While
data scientists struggle with how to make massive amounts of data
available to decision-makers who need information to make good decision,
individuals from all ages and walks of life are struggling with how to sort
through the massive amount of data and communication that come into our lives
every day. Increasingly, those in
the middle—the technology interface designers—are looking at shape and pattern
to guide them in organizing information.

Shape Encodes Critical Information about Nature and the Universe

The Astrolabe was an ancient astronomical computer.

There
is a reason why NASA scientists still use the astronomical records that were
kept by the Babylonians more than 2000 years ago even as they collect new data
with sophisticated new technologies.
Throughout human history, brilliant thinkers have contemplated the
universe and recorded its cycles using the tools they had available at the
time. Their observations were
often built one upon the other. Often, important information and artifacts that
were lost for centuries, and once uncovered, became useful in refining our
science or allowing new discoveries to be made. Many times, scientists and
engineers have made breakthroughs after studying historical artifacts—often outside
their own discipline—by identifying patterns the original creator might not
have even recognized as significant. Learning the “read” the language of shape
is a way of understanding information in a new way. Understanding the story behind shapes may lead to a new
understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Words Capture Ideas; Images Free Them

Words
in context: The application
“Wordle” www.wordle.com enables us to see the gist
of a chunk of text. In this case,
we put in the words of this chapter into the online Wordle application and saw
which words came up most frequently.
Today’s visual language is often a strategic combination of words and
images. (As a visual aside, this wordle does look like a footprint).

For
most of the 20th century, “art” and “communication” were separated
in the Western world. Art was for entertainment or decoration, and
communication occurred via words, spoken or written. Cave paintings were considered “primitive,” ancient textiles
were “folk art” and picture books were for children. That began to change
toward the end of the 20th century with the advent of the World Wide
Web, the fast cycling of information , a new “many-to-many” form of
communication, and the emphasis on innovation.

As
author Daniel Pink said, the 21st century ushered in “conceptual
age.”[i] With the world’s knowledge at our
fingertips, finding information is no longer a challenge. Understanding, communicating,
collaborating with information is the challenge. Age-old visual tools began
appearing—butcher paper on the walls of meeting rooms, napkin sketches during
business lunches—then taking new form on the Web with interactive graphics and
immersive worlds.

The
strategic combination of words + images can capture the sweet spot: A few words
to convey information, contained in an image that conveys context. Words have literal, clear
meaning. Images have figurative
amorphous meaning.
Historically, images and ideas worked together to convey concepts. Then
words and images became disconnected.
With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century,
humanity shifted to text-based written communications and much of the wisdom
encoded in graphics for 12,000 years was lost. Today the ancient images and diagrams are being revived,
restored and reproduced in high resolution on the Web. Many of these images are now being seen
and circulated beyond the museums and archives, the experts and scholars to the
general public for the first time.

We
are at a crossroads in how we use images today. Will the world culture revive the ancient language of shape?
Or largely persist in the unconscious use of visual language? What will we
choose as individuals and as a global collective? Will images be entertaining? Illuminating?
Inspiring? Or containers of wisdom new and old? There are four levels in which images are
being used today.

(1)
The Random Use of Images. Finding sketches and pictures and clip
art that seem like decorative or interesting additions to text. Lots of eye candy and visual
stimulation to accompany the plethora of text we see every day.

(2) Art to Invoke Meaning and Emotion. Inviting artists who “speak the
language of intuition” with their hands and bodies to migrate their “felt”
understanding of the shape of thought into the technological world. Bringing calming and beautiful online
spaces for information—live and
online—with aesthetics as the driver so that information is conveyed with
subliminal context.

(3)
The Shape of Thought Approach: Invoking and responding to imagery with deep
intention: Understanding the
origin of shapes and symbols and invoking them thoughtfully, choosing
appropriate containers for a concept.
Bring anthropologists, scientists and artists together for a “shape of thought”
approach to organizing information.

(4)
Developing the Shape of Thought.
Uncovering and discovering new patterns in data and integrating this new
knowledge into the next iteration of visualization. At this highest level of
imagery, we are learning from the patterns that emerge naturally from
information. How does a list, a spreadsheet, a data set arrange itself
visually? How does that align with
other patterns, from different disciplines and different times? How does that data allow us to iterate
our visualizations to a new level? The shape of thought serves us mostly deeply
when the patterns providing information we could not see before visualizing it.

Prove it with "The Shape Test"

We
see concepts in images, and to the extent those concepts are shared, we
experience communication at a deeper level. As an experiment, try the following Shape Test, linking the
number of the shape with the letter of the definition. Then try it out on someone else at home
or in the office. Then talk about
why you made the decisions you did.

If
you compare your answers with others, you likely found a number of similarities
and some differences. Rarely is
there a universal precise translation from word to image; yet we tend to
associate words with concepts in ways that are mutually understood in
surprising ways.

A 21st Century Renaissance

We
know that we share meaning from shape.We know that today’s proliferation of data requires us to understand
visuals more deeply. We know that we must sift, analyze, condense and
compress.But we stop right
there.Can we take the leap?

At
a time when so much of the world is “connected,” visual language could be a key
to transforming the way we view one another and our planet.It crosses borders, professions, and age
groups—and connects us with Nature and our ancestors.

The
great Renaissances of history occurred at times of convergence, at the
intersection of cultures, traditions, disciplines, arts and sciences. Deep
shifts occurred that enabled breakthroughs in technology, science, and
humanity’s understanding of itself.

During
the most well known Renaissance—in the 14th to the 16th
centuries—artists and scientists returned to and drew upon the wisdom of the
brilliant thinkers before them, the ancient Greek philosophers whose knowledge
was in turn, influenced by earlier teachers from Egypt, India, Persia and
Babylonia. An earlier Renaissance occurred in the 9th to 11th
centuries as translators in the Arab world looked back to Greek classical works
and added new commentaries. Then these texts traveled to through Spain, the
crossroads between Europe and the Arab world to help initiate the birth of our
Universities. These cycles of “rebirth” always included a great return to
periods in history, and the study of visual artifacts that encoded knowledge.

With
the world’s knowledge at our fingertips and all of the world’s population in
our extended networks—we have all the ingredients for another Renaissance that
could bring our cutting-edge technologies together with ancient wisdom about
how humans are connected to Nature and to one another.As with the great Renaissance periods
of the past, exploring the history of imagery can reveal deep insights about
humanity and the world—insights found at the intersection of Nature, geometry
and human communication.

“The beautiful
is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature. When nature begins to reveal
her open secret to a person, he feels an irresistible longing for her most
worthy interpreter, art.”Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Patterns of Genius

While
most of us “read” the language of shape subliminally, many of history’s notable
artists, philosophers and scientists did so intentionally enabling
their genius creations and discoveries.
Leading thinkers in many disciplines explored shapes and their
geometries, learning Nature’s language so they could translate sound into
music, words into poetry, canvasses into art, and observations into scientific
theory.

Page from original copy of Luca Pacioli's 1509 Treatise, De Divina Proportione with sketch of polyhedra by Leonardo da Vinci. On exhibit in Mlan, ItalyCC Paxelsson

A
recent revival of interest in the story of shape focused on a well-known genius
of history, Leonardo Da Vinci, who worked at the intersection of many
disciplines – art, mathematics, science and engineering. Leonardo painted memorable art pieces
including the “Mona Lisa,” designed technologically advanced machinery
including an early version of the helicopter, carried forward mathematical
innovations based on the work of ancient geometers, and discovered the workings
of the human body by dissecting animals.
Nearly 500 years after his death, a novel captured the imagination of a
culture beginning to rediscover visual language. In 2003, the book Da Vinci Code­[i] spun a tale of a historical conspiracy with
clues encoded in ancient artifacts.

While
the “code” concept makes for great fiction, the reality is far less illicit and
far more elegant. Nature speaks
the same way to everyone; some just listen more carefully than others. As
Goethe said, it is an “open secret.”
With today’s tools for analyzing ancient manuscripts and artifacts,
we’re discovering that our ancestors mapped the workings of Nature, and made
discoveries that are helping today’s scientists. Nature’s patterns appear in
pan cultural art throughout time.
It seems like a code because it underlies so many disciplines and
communication forms.

Shapes
in nature –sometimes called “nature’s
language”– are not just static forms. They predict the process of growth, the
cycles of planets and, and the principles of aesthetics. Conspiracy theories
aside, there is some truth to the stories about ancient sects with hidden
documents explaining the patterns of Nature. Knowledge about the relationship
between geometry, shape, art, architecture and science was passed on through
various exclusive organizations over centuries. But the knowledge is not hidden; it can be found with just a
little digging into the journals of people who have influenced global
knowledge. Many were privy to
studies of earlier generations. A
few examples:

The Greek philosopher Plato, known to
most Philosophy 101 students as the author of the political treatise “The
Republic,” was a student of geometry who wrote about “perfect forms,” and
postulated a geometric basis for the universe and in his work Timaeus
(360BC)

German writer Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749-1832) generally known for his literary contributions was a
polymath who studied science, optics, shape and color and whose philosophy
influenced Charles Darwin, who is credited with the theory of evolution.

Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was
mathematician C. L. Dodgson
(1832-1898) whose work in geometry carried forward that of ancient Greek
mathematician Euclid.
Carroll’s writings are thought to contain references to
mathematical and logic problems.

Composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is
thought to have created his harmony, rhythm and other musical structures
based on his studies of shape and proportion. [ii] A quote attributed to him: “music is the arithmetic of sound
as optics is the arithmetic of light.”

From
these and other influential creators of the past, we can surmise that the study
of shape enhances creativity and innovation. Clearly, innovative thinking comes from crossing disciplines
to discover patterns at the intersection.
But there is more to it:
There is something special about certain shapes that allows them to
impact our thinking and imagination in unexpected ways.

Begin with the Golden Mean

The
golden mean is fairly well known as a mathematic concept, so it provides a good
launch into the exploration of shape of thought. Leonardo and Debussy are among those who based some of their
work on the Golden Mean. It
appears all around us in Nature, in art, in architecture and even our teeth –
and yet the concept is elusive to most in these modern times when the power of
shape is not well understood.

The
golden mean is a geometric ratio found throughout Nature and human design. It
is pleasing to the human eye and is one of Nature’s most ubiquitous building
tools. In the next set of images,
you can a “golden rectangle” at work.
A golden rectangle is one in which the long side is slightly more than
one and a half times the other. In
the image, you see a set of nested rectangles with a spiral inside,
demonstrating a unique property of the golden ratio: If you cut a square from the Golden Rectangle, the remaining
rectangle would have exactly the same height-to-width ratio as the original
rectangle. Cut a square from that, and again you are left with a remaining
rectangle that has the same height-to-width ratio, and on and on. Only a rectangle scaled to the Golden
Mean has this property. Inside the rectangle, the “Golden Spiral” is also
defined by this special proportion. It is the same spiral found in the galaxies
and, as shown, in a shell, cauliflower, sunflower and ancient artistic motifs
and is known by its symbol, PHI - Φ.[iii]

In
the 1980s, British dentist Dr. Edwin Levin applied the golden proportion to
make false teeth more natural, an endeavor that led him to create the “golden
mean gauge” instrument to measure the ratio on everything from teeth to insects
to famous architectures.[iv]

Dr. Edwin Levin's "Golden Mean Gauge" shows the golden ratio in a smile, a butterfly wing, the Great Wall of China.

For
more than two millennia, the golden mean has been used by artists, architects
and scientists in wildly different ways:
To design type fonts and page layouts, to design buildings, and to
understand the proportion of the body. Today the golden mean also informs some
of our newest technologies. It is
being used in biotechnology and nanotechnology to design our smallest human
machines; it is also used to understand the structure of the cytoskeleton and
micro-crystals and to understand better the workings of our brains.

As
a “code” the golden mean has turned out to be, as scientist Mario Livio called
it, “astonishing.”[v]
As a key for bringing beauty and power to their art, the golden mean was
known by Leonardo da Vinci and other artists as “divine.”[vi]

Beyond the Golden Mean

As
it turns out, the golden mean is only the beginning of the story. Exploring the
geometry of Nature – spheres, spirals and the practical beauty of five-fold
symmetry –opens a world of knowledge into the art of human communication.

Startlingly,
we’ve now discovered that ancient humans used symbols based on features of
Nature they could not see with their eyes or instruments. Is it possible, as some have theorized, that humans
intuitively speak the language of Nature – not just through observation? That
theory gains credibility with discoveries that made through the electron
microscope and the scanning tunneling microscope.

Some
of the shapes depicted in ancient artifacts that were invisible to the human
eye and came into view only with the advent of 20th century tools
included microstructures that are fundamental to the workings of our planet,
among them: The Carbon-60 molecule
(the buckminsterfullerene), the micro-organism, Emiliania huxleyi,[vii] and the brain protein clathrin[viii].

Each
of these organisms resembles the “buckyball” shape, most familiar to people
because of the geodesic dome created by architect Buckminster Fuller. Each is a
truncated icosahedron (20-faced sphere with 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons). Each
serves as a transport mechanism:
Buckminsterfullerene in the Universe, Emiliania huxleyi in Earth’s oceans, and clathrin in the
brain. And they do so because they have the ability to weave themselves together
when necessary and unbind when their task is done.

Unbound, they show another layer of shapes that are also strangely familiar. In fact,
these shapes can be seen in the art of the ancient Southeast Asian three-way
weave, a part of ancient basketry practices and an important design feature of
the woven balls for the game, sepak-takraw, played with a ball based on the
same structure of buckyballs – and
the same flexible geometry that also inspired Fuller’s geodesic domes.[ix]

Are
the similarities in structure just a coincidence? Or are Nature’s structures somehow understood intuitively
beyond our logical thinking? The
story behind Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome offers insight into these
questions.

The Architect, the Chemist and the Brain

Architect
and philosopher Buckminster Fuller’s life and work demonstrate the power of
shape. Born in 1895 and famous as
“the world’s friendly genius” by the time he died in 1983, Fuller worked across
disciplines and deep into the interrelated aspects of Nature, geometry, and
design.[x]
He was among the visionaries whose work demonstrates the power of
shape—what he called “Nature’s technology”—in cross-disciplinary wisdom. He was known for his philosophy and
architecture, most famously for the geodesic dome that would later have a
profound influence on chemistry and nanotechnology.

The
importance of the sphere came to him in a vision in 1927, at a time when he was
in the depths of despair over the death of his first daughter and his inability
to provide for his new child and her Mother.[xi]
He was questioning his will to live when he envisioned himself
surrounded by a transparent sphere, and these words came into his mind, “You do
not belong to you, you belong to the Universe.” He then dedicated his work to the power of efficient design,
which, he discovered could be found in the hidden geometry of the sphere.

The
dome captured the zeitgeist of the environmental movement. During the socially turbulent 1960’s, Fuller galvanized a
generation of artists and musicians who resonated with his writings about
Nature, and his bubble-like Expo dome became an icon of optimism and holistic
thinking. A student-created geodesic dome was a feature of the first
Earth Day celebration at University of Minnesota, where Fuller was a speaker in
1970 – and the dome would come to be associated with Earth Day and
sustainability, which was central to Fuller’s vision for a better world.
Fuller’s geodesic dome was so appealing to people that it has been used for
world expos, theaters, trade fairs and auditoriums. But the dome had properties
that extended well beyond its aesthetic appeal. After his death, in the 21st
century, the geodesic dome, affectionately called the “buckyball,” would be
considered a key to understanding nanotechnology.[xii]

Fuller
lived to see his intuition develop into a design science approach that has
inspired the world. But he did not live to see another powerful effect of his
vision. It was after his death
that the structure of his geodesic dome inspired a significant scientific
breakthrough: Scientists Richard
Smalley, Harold Kroto and Robert Curl had been puzzling over the 3-dimensional
structure of a newly discovered carbon60 molecule, invisible to the eye even
with a microscope: They knew it
was made up of hexagon shapes, but how could the hexagons curve into a
sphere?

Dr. Kroto recalled his experience inside
Fuller’s Expo ’67 dome in Montreal that was a key feature of the U.S.
Pavilion. He realized that
Fuller’s geodesics held the key to understanding the molecule’s 3-dimensional
curved shape.[xiii]Fuller introduced pentagons between the hexagons to create his domes,
enabling curvature. Richard
Smalley called the buckminsterfullerene the “Rosetta stone of nanoscale
architecture because of its dynamic properties and unique symmetry.[xiv]It enabled chemists to create carbon nanotubes by
introducing pentagons to create curvatures in a lattice structure to close the
ends or to braid the nanotubes into “ropes”.

Fuller
had an intuitive vision of a shape that turned out to be a building block of
the universe—before scientists were able to perceive it in Nature. Was this an example of
understanding “the language of intuition” that is also the language of
nature? To Fuller, beauty of
design and the workings of Nature were not separate. He often talked about “Nature’s technology” and its
resonance with beauty. “When I am working on a problem, I never think about
beauty, but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, it must be
wrong.”[xv]

One
of Buckminster Fuller’s phrases was “invisible architecture,” referring to what
he believed to be unseen organizing principles of the universe. He studied geometry in relation to
“synergy” (the term he popularized meaning “behavior of whole systems
unpredicted by the behavior of its parts considered separately). His own experience demonstrates
how synergy may arise from an innate comprehension of the power of shape.

The Invisible Roots of Symbols

Perhaps
Fuller would not have been surprised to learn that his geodesic dome reflected
an invisible and essential carbon molecule. Or that other shapes that people discovered intuitively
would also turn out to have morphological siblings on the micro-scale. It’s a leap to try to explain why. Is it possible that we “feel” or
“sense” the language of Nature, and automatically express it in our movements
and art?

We
have examples of symbols that seem to have universal meaning, without their
originators knowing why. The
symbol of the triskelion is one.
It is included in the brain protein clathrin. As described above,
clathrin works by folding and unfolding.
When it unfolds, the parts are in a shape of three curved “legs”—the
triskelion.

The
triskelion is a shape that has become a symbol in many cultures around the
globe, dating back to ancient artifacts developed at a time when humans had no
way of knowing its role in the human body.

Ancient
Tibetan, Celtic and British symbols depicting the triskelion

The
folding and unfolding of the brain protein clathrin. [Screenshots from an
animation by Tomas Kirchhausen and Allison Bruce, Harvard Universityhttp://www.idi.harvard.edu/uploads/mm/images/13_1Clathrin_1.mov

Can Nature Help Shape Our Thoughts?

Amazingly,
ancient symbols were based on images of Nature that were invisible to the
people who created them. This
shifts our thinking about communication. We’ve long known that Nature’s
principles enhance art and design—key ingredients in deep communication
(engaging the “heart and mind,” the conscious and unconscious). Now we are beginning to discover
the reverse is also true: That art
and design can give us a glimpse into Nature, perhaps even aspects of Nature as
yet undetected.

Nature
does have a “code” – it’s
comprised of math and geometry, “Nature’s technology” that inspired Fuller and
so many other geniuses. Whether
uncovered though observation or intuitive leaps of thought, Nature’s technology
determines the patterns in the Universe.
Should we be surprised to discover that it also applies to our human
communication?

Looking
back at the scientific observations and artistic of past eras enables discovery
of the shapes and symbols that have endured over time. If we “unpack” these shapes and
symbols, most have a story to tell.
They carry the weight of centuries of human interpretation.

Understanding
the interplay between Nature and shape is a step toward understanding how we
can use Nature’s technology to re-engineer our communication, data
visualization, and information organization at a time of cognitive excess.

It
also is a step toward exploring what we can learn about Nature and our own
human challenges—which were shared by our ancestors—from shapes, symbols and
artifacts that are part of our collective global culture.

[iii]The famous “Fibonacci sequence” is intimately linked to the golden mean. In the 12th century, mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in his studies on rabbit breeding discovered a number series that both reflects PHI and can be used to derive PHI. It is now called the Fibonacci Sequence. This number series is endless, but begins as 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144... These numbers may look random, but they are not. Starting with 0 and 1, each successive number is the sum of the previous two. The PHI ratio starts to appear after the first eight numbers in this sequence. The magical ratio between the numbers then occurs over and over again.

[v]Mario Livio, Head of the Science Division at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, published the most important recent historical work on the Golden Mean in 2002. The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the Worlds Most Astonishing Number is one of the most extensive additions to the timeline of historical and mathematical treatments of the golden mean.

[vi]The golden mean has been a recurring subject within many classic works. It was first mathematically defined in Euclid’s Elements in the 4thcentury BCE and discussed in Vitruvius’s 10 books on architecture. The term “divine proportion” was later applied to the golden mean by Fra Luca Pacioli in his book De Divina Proportione. Written in 1499 and published in 1509 and this was the first book completely devoted to the Divine Proportion. With its 60 color plates of polyhedra, Pacioli’s was also the only book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. The 2000-year timeline of books on the Divine Proportion is discussed later in the "Shape of Thought" series.

[vii]Although it is hard to see the specific geometry of the coccolithopore, Emiliania huxleyi, the most prevalent form is made of 10 round coccolith platelets self assembled with radial symmetry. The geometry of these platelets creates an internal structural pattern of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons, the “truncated icosahedron,” one of the most spherical of the family of polyhedra.

[viii]Clathrin coated vesicles are found throughout the human body, with clathrin’s role to bring nutrients into the body and facilitate communication between the cells. To do this, clathrin assembles into geodesic “basket shapes” of varying sizes. But the clathrin protein that is found in the brain – synaptic clathrin - is exactly the same truncated icosahedron shape as buckminsterfullerene and is sometimes referred to as the “biofullerene.” Koruga, Djuro, Stuart Hameroff, et.al. Fullerene C60 – History, Physics, Nanobiology, Nanotechnology. North Holland Publishers. 1993. p142.

[ix]Subsequent installments of the "Shape of Thought" series explores the influence of the Southeast Asian three-way weave on Fuller’s work in detail.

[x]From 1927 to 1983 R. Buckminster Fuller devoted his life to what became a lifetime experiment that he called “Guinea Pig B” – B for Bucky. During his 56-year experiment, Fuller left an incredible legacy of artifacts, patents and publications, as well as what the Smithsonian called the “most extensive personal archive in existence.” See “Life, Facts & Artifacts” by Bonnie DeVarco, an essay on Fuller’s archive from the companion Web Site for the American Masters Biography: R. Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud.http://www.thirteen.org/bucky/devarco.html

[xi]Fuller’s young daughter, Alexandra, died from complications from polio and spinal meningitis in 1922. His second daughter, Allegra, was born in 1927 when Fuller was 32 years old.

[xii] “For Fuller there were no flat planes. Everything was curved, from space to shape. Everything was in motion and was continually shifting. But the classical shapes remain as guideposts to form found throughout the Universe. His approach the same problems that earlier geometricians and artists tackled by "tiling the plane" or building polyhedra was through the closest packing of spheres. Delineating vector lines within closest packed spheres, Fuller defined the basic polyhedra that could be used as dynamic building blocks on a larger scale.” DeVarco, Bonnie. “Energetic Architecture – Buckminster Fuller’s Geometry of the Sphere.” fromInvisible Architecture. Online Publication. 1996. http://members.cruzio.com/~devarco/invisible.htm

[xiii]“Kroto remembered the day he had walked around with his son inside the Expo Geodesic Pavilion in 1967. He had marveled at the triangular latticework of the huge sphere that surrounded him, a sphere that needed no internal supports. Almost 20 years later as Kroto and Smalley discussed Fuller's geodesic dome and its possible relevance to their finding, Smalley decided to check out a book on Fuller from the library and take a closer look at his domes. He found the secret in a photo of Fuller's 1958 Union Tank Car Dome in Baton Rouge, the largest clear span enclosure of its day. Fuller used pentagons! Once they figured that out, it was easy for them to build a cage structure of sixty atoms whose shape exhibited 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. Kroto and Smalley felt it most appropriate to name it “buckminsterfullerene” for its striking resemblance to Fuller's geodesic domes” DeVarco, Bonnie. “The Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene” from Invisible Architecture. Online Publication. 1996. http://members.cruzio.com/~devarco/nature.htmSee a longer account of the discovery of buckminsterfullerene in Chapter 2 “September 1985” in: Aldersey-Williams, Hugh. The Most Beautiful Molecule – The Discovery of the Buckyball. Canada: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1995. pp52-92.

[xiv]In an early lecture on nanotechnology in 1996, the late chemist and Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley described the importance of buckminsterfullerene’s natural structure to the still emergent field of nanotechnology, "Carbon has an incredible ability to spontaneously assemble to form these objects. That's what we really discovered. The more we think about that, and how neat these objects are, the more we are beginning to realize that we can find ways of tricking nature in to self assembling carbon into other fullerene-like shapes as well, and that these new materials may well have major practical as well as theoretical significance. "In fact, it emerges that buckyball was (and is) a sort of Rosetta Stone of what we now realize is an infinity of new structures made of carbon one way or another . . . And the deciphering of the C60 Rosetta Stone has led us to start dreaming of all sorts of new structures that truly are geodesic architecture on a nanometer scale, and to scheme about how to make them." Smalley , Richard. "From Tubes to Ropes." Presentation to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, S. Texas January 1996 http://cnst.rice.edu/aiche96.html

[xv]Fuller’s original oft-quoted comment in full is: "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." This quote is attributed to numerous sources in Fuller’s live talks and transcripts.

07/27/2010

The tree is
history’s most enduring symbol, one that demonstrates beautifully how our
visual representations are shaped by human perception.We use shapes to visualize knowledge.
These visualizations, in turn, shape the way we perceive the world.Using the Shape of Thought Approach [1], we can see how history and the leading edge meet in
a universal image that has transformed as humanity has transformed.

Traveling through history in a short series of images and visualizationsof the tree, we can see a very different story about human perception than that told in the text-based, historical record.Looking at how humans have used the tree structure as a communication tool, we can see how humanity’s perception of who we are and how we fit in the Universe changed through the centuries.

The following
three tree stories - The Tree of Life, The Tree of Human Relationships and The
Tree of Knowledge - demonstrate how our perception of ourselves and our
relationships is not static.Instead, it is a dynamic, ever-changing visual conversation between
generations

The
Tree of Life to the Superorganism

The World Tree

The tree is one
of the oldest, most enduring visual metaphors in human history. Because of its
dense networks of roots, branches and foliage, the tree is often used to
visualize relationships between species, languages, families and social groups.
For at least the past 2000 years, it has also been used to map hierarchies of
knowledge and ideas.

The tree is
central to the way many cultures understand the cosmos. It also represents the
source of life. Every sacred practice and religion used tree myths to tell
origin stories, from the oral tradition of the Icelandic Edda to the Tree of
Life in the Judeo Christian Bible. The tree also holds answers to future-oriented questions
about information management, because its growth pattern involves fundamental
properties of geometry, including the Golden Mean, which can be applied as a
design approach or used in algorithms for digital design.

Ancient cultures
throughout the world used the tree as a symbol to represent the construction of
the universe. The oldest symbolic use of the tree was the “World Tree” or the
“Tree of Life.” Mircea Eliade, renowned historian of myth, religion, ritual and
symbol, traced the World Tree idea to the navel of the Earth, a symbol found in
the folklore, stories, rituals and architectures of numerous indigenous
cultures around the world. The Tree of Life is also referred to as “axis mundi”
or the cosmic axis - literally the point of connection between the sky and
earth.

In Norse
mythology the world tree is called “Yggdrasil”, an oak tree that connects all
nine worlds of Norse Mythology together.Visualized as a colossal tree, the Yggdrasil connected the heavens to
the Earth with its roots extending deep underground.

For pre-Columbian
cultures of Mesoamerica (the Aztec, Izapan, Mixtec Maya and Olmec) the World
Tree was central to the origin of the Cosmos. Their reverence for the Milky Way
was linked directly to the World Tree, the center of the Earth-Sky.

Since ancient
times, we have represented humanity and the gods or higher powers as part of
the tree of life.More than three
millennia ago in Mesopotamia, the tree of life was depicted on bas-reliefs as
both a symbolic and literal image capturing the force that connects all life.

To the ancient
Egyptians, the “tree of life” was an Acacia tree from which the first couple,
Isis and Osiris emerged; they called it the “tree in which life and death are
enclosed." [2] In the Judeo-Christian Bible, the book of Genesis introduces two trees—the Tree
of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit from the tree of
life gives immortality. When Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of
Good and Evil, they lose their innocence and are banished from the Garden of
Eden. A more abstract Tree of Life can be found in the Hebrew Kabbalah. Called
the “Sephirot” it is a mystical diagram with ten sephirot (spheres or
emanations). Between the 10 spheres are 22 sacred pathways used to “map”
creation—wisdom from the direct understanding of the nature of God.

The Tree of Life
in the religious or symbolic context encapsulated the idea that everything is
related, from the cosmos to the tiniest atoms in our bodies. In the nineteenth
century we witnessed the emergence of a different tree metaphor, the scientific
tree of life.

Classifying Life

Charles Darwin,
a naturalist who spent a decades carefully charting the variations among
animals of the same species in different environments, helped ground the
fledgling field of evolutionary biology in a more exacting science. He
published his remarkable scientific work, On the Origin of Speciesin 1859. This book contained only one illustration -
an abstract diagram showing Darwin’s theoretical “tree” of multiple species
related to a common genus.

Many years
earlier Darwin had drawn the genesis of his tree of life idea as a simple
network structure. A sketch next to his earliest thoughts on this tree of
relationships and speciation was drawn 22 years before his legendary book was
finally published. This sketch is considered to be the very first “network
diagram” - his first depiction of a scientific “tree of life” next to his now
famous words, “I think.”

In the 19thcentury, biologist and physician Ernst Haeckel, a protégé of Darwin’s, was the
first to describe and codify the “phylogenetic tree” into five branches. Charles
Darwin knew it was important to visualize the relationships among groups of
organisms for his theory of evolution. Integrating Darwin’s idea of an abstract
branching diagram with Haeckel’s own ideas about genetic evolution, Haeckel animated this vision using a literal
tree structure as a natural metaphor and as a structural diagram of
relationships.Forty years after Darwin’s
sketch, Haeckel published the first official image of the genetic “Tree of
Life”. At the time, the notion of human progress was deeply embedded into the
theory of evolution and humans were considered the pinnacle of the Tree.

As both artist and scientist, Haeckel is best known for his beautiful illustrations of the morphology of microscopic life forms. He named thousands of new species and coined many terms for biology including “phylogeny”. His tree was called the “phylogenetic tree.”

The evolving
morphology of the scientific “tree of life” through the next couple centuries
tells a story about our increasing knowledge of life. In the 20th
and 21st centuries, biologists have acquired a greater understanding
of the genetic relationships among the species. Haeckel’s literal image of the tree with roots still limited
our way to diagram genetic relationships. The Tree of Life was not a direct or
hierarchical lineage, but rather a radial branching of various species from a
common ancestor. By 1960, the
Phylogenetic Tree image organized the species’ into five different “Kingdoms.”

Throughout most of the 20th
century, the tree of life still had five kingdoms; we still shaped our understanding
of life into an anthropomorphic framework by the use of the word, “kingdoms.”

More
recently, the work of scientist Carl Woese started a revolution in the way we
classify life by taking out the hierarchy where humans represent the pinnacle
of evolution. He did this by organizing the tree of life into only three
domains.

At this point,
the plant and animal “kingdoms” were seen to be part of the Eucarya family, and
the name “kingdoms” had been changed to “domains.” The new tree of life’s three
domains were dominated by microscopic life - bacteria and archaea. Lynn
Margulis, who championed a new way of looking at evolution in the theory of
symbiogenesis, originally proposed by cell biologist Boris Kozo-Polyansky
created the first dendrogram showing these trees in the 1970s.

With Haeckel’s
19th century conception of dominant branches of life being animalia,
protista and plantae we look back
to see this as a time when
scientists considered humans and meso-scale life to be the dominant life form
on the planet. Today, we
understand a vastly different story about life on Earth. Humans have been
knocked off their pedestal.

Mapping Life on Earth

Last century, the
burgeoning of genetic knowledge and a concern about the many threats to
biodiversity gave rise to a project to map all life on Earth. Using the power
of the World Wide Web to link the work of hundreds of biologists from around
the world together, the “Tree of Life web project” (ToL) was launched in 2002. In its first five years, this project has networked together the collective
work of professional scientists, teachers, students and amateurs. Over 1.7
million species are identified and searchable on more than 10 thousand webpages. [3]

In 2006, a new,
interactive genomic tree of life was completed by the European Molecular
Biology Laboratory (EMBL) showed us a different picture of the relationship of
humans to other forms of life. It is considered the most accurate tree of life
to date.

The evolution of
tree imagery demonstrates how, through a new generation of science centered
around genomics, we are reframing the way we look at our place on our planet.
New research by Princeton biologist Bonnie Bassler demonstrates that,
genomically speaking, 99 percent of our bodies are comprised of bacteria that
actually talk to each other using a chemical language called quorum sensing.
With new views based on the burgeoning field of genomics we are forced to
further to rethink our place in the tree. Humans have become a “footnote in the
story of bacteria” and life looks more like a vast “superorganism” from this
genomic point of view.

These new visualizations of the tree of life convey a far more accurate "whole systems" view of life on Earth. We see the dominant branches of the tree the very modest place humans, and all mesoscale life hold in a living system dominated by microscale life. As scientists map more and more of the diversity of life, we need bigger, and more dynamic “tree” maps to contain the hundreds of thousands of life forms on the tree.

In the late 1990's, CAIDA's WALRUS, a large graph mapping too, enabled us to visualize the structure of the Phylogenetic tree as we know it today through a 3D hyperbolic space through a computer screen.

Even today, 3D
visualization gives us a glimpse of what might be possible when we are able to
fly in and around a 3 dimensional virtual or augmented genomic tree and to
“feel” where we fit into the whole.We see in the biological Tree of Life, the progression from a linear,
hierarchical vision of relationships to a circular, radial and eventually
spherical image of the tree. As we’ll see below, the metamorphosis of the
family tree paralleled the evolution of the Tree of Life as humans began to
think less traditionally and linearly in our use of metaphors.

A Metaphor becomes an Algorithm

The tree in
nature as a visual metaphor and symbol has become more and more abstract when
we use its image as a structural principle to organize social relationships and
knowledge.But can the tree as a
visual metaphor drawn directly from nature somehow also lead us directly back
to nature’s own geometry? Could we decipher a “code” that would allow us to
automatically generate virtual 3-dimensional trees as realistic as those in the
real world? Although most people are unaware, we are already well on our way to doing that. It is part the most recent history of our visual languages: the history of visual math (fractals) and the emergence of virtual worlds.

In the 1970s biologist and botanist, Aristide Lindenmeyer created a formal grammar – a computer language to model the growth processes of plant development in order to study plant growth. His language is called “L-Systems” and it has been used since that time to generate lifelike branching structures. [4]

Amazingly, the
tree takes us right back to our very special symmetry. When Lindenmeyer began
his work, mathematicians had already discovered two things: (1) math could be
used to understand complex systems that are self generative and these could be
visualized as geometric objects or “fractals” and (2) The Fibonacci series [5] has the special property of “fivefold symmetry” that is an important property
of organic forms of life. Lindenmeyer applied the Fibonacci series to fractal
algorithms in order to create this new “language.” L-systems could generate and
model the morphology of branching organisms that look and act like real
trees.Certainly he, as those
before him understood and used a type of geometric “code” derived from Nature.
The Fibonacci series approximates the Golden Mean.

Today L-Systems
are used by botanists, physicists and ecologists to better understand the
natural world. But L-Systems has already had a huge effect on computer
programmers, 3D designers and virtual world developers today. Lindenmeyer’s
computer “language” inspired a new field within artificial life. Artificial
Life, commonly called ALife studies evolutionary agents or populations of
computer simulated life forms in artificial environments. ALife researchers use
three fundamental concepts essential to our understanding of structure and
processes of life: symmetry, complexity and self-similarity. They apply the
tools of L-systems to generate “life” in cyberspace as evolving virtual worlds. [6]

The Tree of Human Relationships

Trees of our Forefathers

The tree has
been used for hundreds of years to organize our genealogical histories.Our forefathers are the “roots” of our
branching family line, and the branches reflect our relationships to each other
with a similar, hierarchical beginning. Trees showed heritage to be related to
royal bloodlines and religious figures. By the 12th century, the Christian
religion emphasized the connection between the New and the Old Testament by
visually codifying the line of Jesus back to King David in illuminated “Jesse
Trees”.The Jesse tree is envisaged
to demonstrate the direct lineage between Jesus and the Prophets of the Old
Testament to prove he was a direct descendent. It
is based on the prophecy of Isaiah, "there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall
grow out of his roots." [7] Yet even in biblical Jesse Trees, a pagan
female figure, the Cumaean Sybil was also included with the Prophets because
she had predicted the birth of a “messiah.”

The Jesse Tree of the Judeo-Christian Bible, depicted in countless illuminated manuscripts, paintings and stained glass windows chronicled the genealogy of Jesus up to the Father of King David.The Jesse Tree
as a structural metaphor continued to be used through the centuries by Royal
families. Royalty used consanguinity trees to understand lines of descent and
to determine whom they could marry.

Visually, these trees progressively went
from a literal to a more abstract form. In the tradition of the “Jesse Tree,”
royal consanguinity trees perpetuated the royal status of bloodlines by
conflating royal blood with religious and
royal decree. Consanguinity trees were theoretical diagrams of blood relations
showing who may marry and who may inherit.

Trees become Structures & Charts

A new symbol
system was created in the field of anthropology as an abstract diagram used to
demonstrate the many types of familial relationships within different cultures.
In the 20th century, anthropologists studying familial relationships through
“kinship charts” began to find numerous non-hierarchical and patriarchal
familial formations of bloodlines.

Cultural practice such as matrilineal and
avuncular family structures made us rethink
our linear, hierarchical categories and appreciate the diversity of family
structures and lines of descent.

Interest in
ancestry began to grow in the latter part of the 20th century. The power of the
World Wide Web in the 1990s unleashed an explosion of interest in personal
genealogical research that could be carried out from anyone’s home. Digital census records and historical
collections were brought into ancestry web sites for broad access to
information on the Internet.

Genealogy networks and software tools enabled thousands of people to
trace their ancestry and link to others with the same lineage. Family tree
templates, charts and software make it easy to input family information, share
and display it with others. Many of these contemporary family trees use more
radial abstract tree diagrams than the elaborate heraldic structures of the
past.

Dynamism and Dimension

The Internet
revolution has changed the basic nature of our personal and community
relationships. Humans are collaborating and communicating with each other;
mapping relationships has gone beyond genetic heritage and geographical locations
on Earth to include complex and overlapping sets of networks. As we communicate globally and
instantly with each other through email and social media, our game consoles,
PDA’s and IPhones, our relationships increased and global communities of
students, scientists, friends and international business colleagues have
emerged.

Our hierarchical
trees of human relationship were turning ever more radial with the rise of global
communities coming out of enhanced synchronous and asynchronous communication
via the Internet, Now we have numerous dynamic graphs of social networks, where
we can see “communities” linked by affinity rather than by geography or blood.

Social groups
are now linked by interest, affinity and knowledge. These groups can include
thousands of people. We can learn about our transforming culture by analyzing
these new social groupings. We now want to “see” how our new communities
congregate in cyberspace compared to relationships in the physical world, and
how subgroups arise, branch off and change through time.As Web 2.0 applications, social
networking and microblogging hubs like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook scale
out, each and every one of us can now see affinity “friendship networks” of our
contacts in the real and virtual environments.

New visualizations such as
Twitter’s tweetmaps and Facebook’s friendwheels are based on branching tree structures that have become increasingly abstract,
nonlinear, and dynamic. These radial wheels also show how our networks of
associations are interconnected, demonstrating that we are all linked to each
other by less than “six degrees.”

With the advent
of social networking and blogging, digital mapping tools are now being merged
with blogs and network hubs such as Friendster, LinkedIn and Facebook. In 2006
IBM released ManyEyes, a Web 2.0 site a number of visualization tools anyone
can use to visualize their own data and share it with others. [8]

Since that time, the toolset behind ManyEyes has been integrated with
interactive news hubs such as the New York Times Visualization Lab. This way,
users can create and share their own visualizations with up-to-the-minute
statistical data from New York Times Stories. Social network tools are now
changing rapidly with an explosion of shared data and locative information from
myriad sources. Expectations for
the emerging Semantic Web suggest that this new level of ontologically
networked information will enable us to visualize even larger meta-networks of
relationships. These
visualizations will provide new insights about the complex, emergent
organization of our growing communities and the knowledge these communities
share.

The Tree of Knowledge to Mapping Knowledge Domains

Structuring Knowledge with Arboria

In addition to
mapping relationships, humans have also used trees or “arboria” to structure
knowledge and organize ontologies.
Going back Aristotle’s categories of logic, third century Neoplatonist
philosopher Porphyry visually codified these categories into a tree structure
that was later called “Porphyry’s Tree.” The terms ‘genus’ and ‘species’ used
by Darwin and Haeckel for their scientific Tree of Life derived their use from
the more ancient practice Porphyry used to trace relationships between abstract
dichotomies (genus differentia) and their sources (species).

The Tree of Life
and Porphyry’s Tree further influenced medieval thinkers to use trees to
identify relationships between different categories or types of knowledge. In
the 6th century, Bishop Isidore of Seville used trees to organize his
encyclopedia, “Etymologiae” and Catalan mystic and philosopher Ramon Llull
followed suit by using Porphyry’s structure to depict the disciplines of
knowledge as Ars Sapientiae, or Tree of
Knowledge. The model of
Porphyry’s Tree was also used in tree diagrams for medieval religious books.
Trees of Virtues and Vices were used to visually diagram moral stories in the
life of Jesus, dichotomizing good and bad.

Trees were also used by later
writers, delineating the structure of book sections or geometric classes such
as Luca Pacioli’s Tree of Proportions in his book on the Divine Proportion, De
Divina Proportione, published in 1509.

Over the following several centuries, trees continued to be used to organize categories of knowledge, topics and subjects in encyclopedias.

Organizing the Data Deluge

In today’s digital culture, the current profusion of data requires us to find new ways to organize vast amounts of information: to see more at once, to allow for numerous the points of view (POV), and to introduce dynamism in our models. In order to do this, the metaphor of the tree has brought us from linear trees to cone, spherical and hyperbolic trees. The use of the tree structure continued through the 19th, 20th and 21st century as a way to organize knowledge and our web site directories.

In 1991, Stuart Card and his team at Xerox Parc introduced dynamism to the tree structure by creating “cone trees” that could be rotated. These trees moved away from the top down linear structuring, but allowed multiple views and the ability for the user to spin the cone tree around to see all the data.

Three university students who worked at Xerox Park—including visualization pioneer Ramana Rao—were inspired by the nonperiodic tilings-based artworks of artist M.C. Escher to try to create a dynamic way to visualize a tree of related information or content. Influenced by the hyperbolic math that MC Escher used (which was actually enhanced by Escher’s discussions with geometer Donald Coxeter while he was creating his artworks), Rao and his colleagues created a browser interface that would enable each chosen node to become the center around which all the other connected nodes would be organized. This became the first hyperbolic tree browser through Rao’s company, Inxight Software, Inc.

Along with social relationships, the nature of human knowledge began to change with the advent of the World Wide Web.Today, we have too much data and it is changing too fast for us to stay current. It is important to have simple ways to navigate and visualize connections between ideas, information and domains of knowledge. We can do this by revolutionizing the way we look at data by visualizing its larger patterns.

As our knowledge increases on the Internet and access to massive databases of information must be analyzed, classified, accessed and understood, we need new structures to envision broader swaths of knowledge, its creation and evolution. In the first decade of this century, Dr. Katy Borner, Chaomei Chen and Kevin Boyack pioneered a new direction for visualization as applied to “domains of knowledge” by mapping the growing domain structure ofscientific disciplines through citations indexes.

Boyack’s work with Richard Klavans has undergone almost a decade of refinement in the visual metaphors used for these structures, becoming less and less hierarchical and more natural, almost biological in shape. These new science maps are based on hundreds of thousands of citations and are analyzed and visualized to identify emergent paradigms of scientific knowledge domains.

Now that
visualizations can illustrate the radial patterns and connections between
different types of knowledge, we are able to see relationships between
disciplines again.The branching
connections and overlaps between research is highlighted in a new kind of
mapping developed by a cluster of scholars and leaders in the field of
information visualization.These
are called “Knowledge Domain” maps. [9]

A New Aesthetics for Knowledge Visualization

“Knowledge domain” visualizations have become a growing genre now known as “Science Maps.” A new information aesthetics defines the way to show metrics across a broad range of source material. More cross fertilization between disciplines is seen. More data is being generated collaboratively in the public domain. Using a public Wikipedia “data dump” in 2007, Borner, et.al. applied knowledge domain visualization methods to understanding how science, math and technology are represented in Wikipedia - showing where they cluster and where they overlap.

Although the Wikipedia map of science is just a snapshot of Wikipedia at a moment in time, eventually such “maps” will be able to be used as dynamic interfaces into huge repositories of shared information. As we move further into the dynamism and non-linearity of collaborative information, visualization tools are being created to visualize knowledge “flows” over time through new kinds of visualization such as those by Moritz Stefaner’s Well-Formed Eigenfactor.

A new aesthetics
of data visualization is emerging. The universal image of the tree has
transformed from a natural form that was used as a mythical image, a visual
metaphor, a symbol, a dynamic organizing structure for information, and
finally, an algorithm that generates lifelike trees in virtual space.

The tree
structure has morphed from a static image to a dynamic way to look at the
changing patterns in large amounts of data.As we used the tree to map relationships between humans and
knowledge, our tree patterns evolved from a linear 2-dimensional tree to radial
tree to a 3-dimensional sphere tree. Now we can return to the original mythical
images of the World Tree and the Tree of Life and take these tendrils out
further to the Global Mind.

Shape of Thought Mural, Clegg & DeVarco, 2009/2010

The
rapid growth of social media and knowledge domain mapping is changing the way
we communicate our relationships, our knowledge, and our relationship to our
planet. As the streaming, conversational network of the realtime global
community grows, the only way we can see our organizational forms from a
“satellite view” is to use visualization tools.

These dynamic tree structures and new visualizations can be thought of as a small world networks.
These are mathematical graphs of networks. In the burgeoning field of network
theory, which builds on early work by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in
1967, everyone is connected to everyone else by no more than six degrees.
Milgram postulated that networks of clusters are connected to other clusters
with very few bridges, connecting all the nodes between. We can think of this
as a number of linked or nested tree clusters. In the “Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon” game, this idea was born out and popularized.

The
“Oracle of Bacon” game was more than just a popular game. It influenced
mathematician/physicists Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz to establish the
mathematical principles whereby Small World Theory could be rigorously proven
as a class of random graphs. This
complex systems algorithm initiated the new “science of networks” that allows
scientists to better understand collective dynamics through graphing techniques
or complex tree structures. Similar dynamics can be seen in any type of
network. Physicist
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi later proved that the distribution of these networks
follows a specific power law, and this common blueprint can be seen in a vast
array of networks – from intra-cellular protein networks to human social
networks. Network theory is now
able to be put to pragmatic use for everything from
computer viruses to human behavior. Scientists led by Alessandro Vespignani
have recently used network algorithms to map how patterns of global
transport networks can help us quickly respond to pandemic outbreaks. [10]

From the Kevin Bacon game to a game changer for humanity, small world network theory and its emerging class of visualization technologies offer newways of thinking and “seeing” that amplifies our human ability to share knowledge for global self-reflexivity. What began with the tree metaphor has become instead a dynamic language of patterned networks of whole systems behavior – systems of life, knowledge and relationship.

“These patterns are biological, they are scale independent – the patterns we see when we use our powerful lenses to explore the outer reaches of the cosmos and the inner dimensions of the cell. Visionary language mirrors the history of knowledge, the neurostructure of synaptic behavior, the self-assembly of crowd consciousness, the ubiquitous mobility of swarm behavior, the ephemeral architecture of smart mobs. But it does more – it mirrors the span of self-awareness to mass introspection by engaging our emotional intelligence through the act of seeing our reflection. In the words of biologist Barbara McClintock, it offers us “a feeling for the organism.”"[11]

Through the evolution of the Tree of Life, the Tree of
Human Relationship and the Tree of Knowledge, we see the story that brought us
to today’s visualization
technologies reflecting the ‘superorganism’ of collective thought.